Many pre-schools, schools, day care and child care facilities (collectively, hereafter “schools”) are required by state or local authorities to track the entrance and exit of children. Most schools simply require parents to manually sign an attendance sheet each time their child is picked up or dropped off at the school. These attendance tracking sheets are generally referred to as ‘sign-ins’ or ‘sign-in sheets’. There are many shortcomings with such sign-ins, however, as parents sometimes forget to sign in or send someone who is not authorized to pickup the child. Parents are also required to document the time that the child is signed in or out and they often write down the wrong time for one reason or the other. This can cause problems in custody issues as well in billing and attendance records. In addition, manual sign-in systems create massive amounts of paper that the schools are required to store for long periods of time.
In order to address some of the problems of manual sign-ins, automated systems have emerged such as ProCare's Childcare Management and Daycare Software and Child Care Management (CCM) software. While automated systems certainly help by eliminating the need to store large amounts of paper, many problems remain. One of the problems with automated systems is that they do not address the situation of parents that forget to sign in or out or simply ignore the attendance process. Moreover, schools may be required by law to visually observe the drop off and pick-up of each individual child.
Up to now, there has been no way to validate the attendance process and ensure a clear chain of custody either by using manual or automated methods.